The Shaggy Club
At fourteen Shaggy became a punk. At seventeen she left home. She became a DJ, den mother, and Dear Abby to the Dallas teenage underground. And then it was time to go back home.
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“Yes, I’m starving. So what are you doing after the show?”
Shaggy hands him the quarter-moon-shaped burger. “Well, raising hell, of course, with you.”
December
Christmas is coming, the end of 1984. For the first time since she was fourteen and singing lead for the Spuratics—a group that split up after its third gig—Shaggy has a band. They don’t have a name yet, but things are rolling. She’s been practicing her bass a lot, and the Niteman, a DJ at KNON whose show runs just before Shaggy’s, plays harmonica and guitar and does vocals. He’s a 27-year-old Harvard M.B.A. who got bored with business a year ago and showed up at KNON with a good record collection and an uncanny voice: he can imitate Bing Crosby one second and Joe Strummer of the Clash the next and have them both doing “White Christmas.” He’s also blond, blue-eyed, and smoothly handsome, nice assets for a lead singer. On lead guitar is a guy they call the Mighty Quinn; the Niteman met him while they were camping out for Bruce Springsteen tickets. Quinn is 31, divorced, has a kid. Nowadays the three of them hang out together all the time. They jam old sixties rock-and-roll songs in the Niteman’s Lower Greenville house, sometimes with a bunch of gawky Harvard M.B.A.’s hanging around wearing slacks and trying to seem loose. The Niteman’s M.B.A. is behind him—now he wears leather jackets, black hightops, and pink-and-black bandannas. But he still has all these Ivy League pals. What he needs is a drummer.
Back at the Bill House—well, Royce moved to New Orleans. Jenny had to move back in with her parents so she could save money to go to UT. The roommate with the pink rat shaved her head almost completely bald and began telling everyone that Sid Vicious was actually Jesus Christ. She moved out in November for parts unknown. Shaggy’s only roommate now is a 24-year-old drummer named Fish, who plays for Unterwasser and works as a manager at the 8.0. He and Shaggy have to split the Bill House’s entire $475-a-month rent, plus bills.
After The Pajama Party tonight, Shaggy is going to Lucas B&B, an all-night diner in Oak Lawn. A little before 5 a.m., she is jammed into a corner booth with Elicia, the Niteman, and four other guys, who all look pretty normal. The coming of cold weather has delighted Shaggy because it means she can wear her most prized possession: a weather-beaten white leather jacket with six-inch-long fringe spilling out from the sleeves and back. She bought it years ago on layaway at a vintage clothing store and loves to run down the street with her arms out to the side, like wings.
The only other customers at Lucas B&B are a smattering of gays fresh from the clubs on Cedar Springs, a couple of cops, and a few newspaper route drivers. On the air tonight, Shaggy said the apocalypse was coming because the earth is getting hotter every year. But now she’s concerned only about her waffles. Lucas B&B is famous for its waffles, and Shaggy is starving.
“Hey,” says the Niteman, slouching in the corner of the booth next to Shaggy, “how come you cats ain’t got anything to munch on?”
“No money,” says Jerry, a guy with a motorcycle cap near the end of the booth. “I’ve got five bucks to last me till Tuesday.” Most of the others are similarly strapped, except for a scrawny kid who is almost getting squeezed out of the end of the booth; he has ordered a cheeseburger, a salad, and fries, which seems spectacularly extravagant at a time when all the others are feeling the Christmas budget crunch.
Shaggy is eating her waffles, and the Niteman entertains the table by doing imitations of Joe Strummer, who sings like he’s got gravel in his mouth and isn’t happy about it. The Niteman sucks in his cheeks, bulges out his eyes, and growls his way through “Silent Night” and “My Way.”
“Next,” says Jerry, “here’s the new one by the Waffles.” Everybody laughs. Jerry has given in to temptation and ordered some waffles with his remaining five bucks, and now everybody else is giving in too. Shaggy’s disappearing order, swimming in butter and syrup, is impossible to resist.
“Here’s the extended, remixed, EP dance mix of the Waffles’ latest hit,” says Shaggy, laughing.
“Boy, I’d like to make the Waffle video,” Elicia says.
“Our children are growing up without valuable training as to how they can protect themselves against waffles,” Shaggy intones in a Cockney-accented PSA voice. “Three thousand people die from waffles every day—that’s nineteen thousand every year. These waffles are devastating our children. They eat them every night at four-thirty a.m. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not too late. Our children can be saved. Join Waffle Stompers of America.”
The scrawny, starved-looking kid at the edge of the booth has finished his burger and fries. He’s now unwrapping packages of Premium Saltines and eating them too.
When Shaggy gets home, it’s nearly six in the morning. Sometimes, a long time ago, the Bill House would still be all lit up, and an Alarm album would be pumping from the stereo. But tonight the house is absolutely black and quiet—nobody is home. No music, not even a skate punk gliding by outside. Shaggy unlocks the door and walks inside. It’s strange, like entering the house of a murder victim, looking for clues. On nights like this, when Fish doesn’t come home, Shaggy can’t sleep. She keeps a baseball bat in bed with her.
“It’s so good to hear nothing,” Shaggy says as she plugs in the blinking Christmas tree lights to give the place some life. “I go to work, and I listen to music all day. I get home, on goes the stereo. And at twelve o’clock, I go to KNON—more music.”
In her new room, the one that used to be Jenny’s and Diana’s and a few other people’s, Shaggy shows where she has put all her stuff. Her posters are more spread out on the walls, and her vanity has come out of the closet, just like Royce did when he inherited Jennifer’s room last summer. On a cork bulletin board near her bed, Shaggy has found room to pin up more photographs. One is a picture of her dad holding her by her arms when she was just a baby, taking tiny, tentative steps across her parents’ front lawn.
“You know, I look at that picture,” Shaggy says, sitting on the edge of her bed, “and sometimes I think that my dad’s really messed up a lot. He didn’t save any money or buy much insurance, didn’t plan in case something happened, and so he can’t put me through college. But I look at that picture, and I know he taught me how to walk, you know? It means a lot to me.”
She’s coming down from the buzz of the show, from the buzz of the sugary waffles. It’s her pattern on Sunday mornings. She’ll be reeling off something amazingly important one second, talking about going somewhere and doing something, and the next second she’ll just crash.
“Did I tell you yet,” she says after a while, “that I’ve decided to move back and live with my parents again? Maybe as soon as New Year’s. From day one, you know, my mother has wanted me to move back home. She’d be a lot cooler about things now—she’d have to be. I’ve proved that I can make it out on my own.” She reaches down as if to untie her shoelaces, then realizes she’s wearing her black boots. She’s too tired to pull them off.
“I just realized I can’t afford it here anymore,” she says. “And I really need to save money and get a car and get some other things. Then I started thinking about their house, and how in a few years I may be inheriting it. There’s so much that needs to be done first. My parents say that if I come home and take over the house payment, which is about a hundred and ten dollars, when the mortgage is paid off in a few years they’ll put the house in my name. Just being back there will help a lot, making it so that my mother doesn’t have to worry about how she’s going to pay the bills and not have to worry about watching after my dad all the time. You just have to see it to understand. They’ve been miserable for a really long time. Just for the sake of ironing things out, I’d like to see my parents happy there, just once.”
Shaggy pulls her legs and boots up onto her bed and talks about how much she misses Royce and Diana. She knows these are her last days in the Bill House, so when she walks through it she keeps bursting into tears: at the bathroom sink, where Diana did all her weird hair coloring; outside her closet, where Royce used to crash after waking her up with some wild tale; at the kitchen counter, where Jenny mourned over her mattress cake. She misses everybody who used to live here, who would be making noise and messes and trouble if this were a Saturday night in July.
“We used to do this thing with safety pins,” she says out of the blue. “They were a real hoot back then. We’d rig it up to make it look like the safety pin was going through our cheeks. But, I grew out of that. Not ‘grow’ in the sense of getting older, but ‘grow’ in the sense of finding yourself, knowing exactly what you want to do so you don’t have to be anxious all the time. It’s still fun—I still get in the mood to do that stuff once in a while. Like you’re down at the Twilite Room and you just feel like being tough all of a sudden, so you’re in the parking lot and you break a bottle or something, you know, to get that old feeling back.
She doesn’t want to be alone yet, to go to sleep yet, even though she’s tired. “I’m sleepy, but I’m restless,” she says. “I feel like there’s still something to do. You know, I can remember when I’d stay up forty-eight hours at a time. Now, I don’t know, sometimes I feel really old. No, I don’t. Not really. Even though I really do. As old as the hills.”
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